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Secondary ticket markets - blessing or curse for consumers?

Geoff Riley

19th December 2016

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The secondary ticket market is one that arose strong emotions. For some it is a chance to snap up tickets for a must-see event or off-load tickets when personal circumstances change. For thousands of others, the price gouging of businesses who use bots to hoover up tickets at official prices as soon as they become available and then tout them in the secondary market for highly-inflated prices is hard to swallow.

The Competition and Markets Authority is paying close attention to the market and has just launched a pre-Christmas enforcement investigation into suspected breaches of consumer protection law in the online secondary tickets market.

The sector is an oligopoly made up of four main secondary ticketing platform websites – GET ME IN!, Seatwave, StubHub and viagogo.

You can find out more of their investigation here

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Geoff Riley

Geoff Riley FRSA has been teaching Economics for nearly forty years. He has over twenty years experience as Head of Economics at leading schools. He writes extensively and is a contributor and presenter on CPD and Revision conferences in the UK and overseas.